


Pet Beetle

by dalesy (Lonqu)



Category: Kamen Rider Ex-Aid
Genre: M/M, emotionally constipated doctors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-14
Updated: 2018-04-14
Packaged: 2019-04-22 22:48:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14318742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lonqu/pseuds/dalesy
Summary: "I want to talk to you." Hiiro takes the deep dive off the grotto cliff, plunging into ice cold water that fills the room with its chill as the warm, charged silence is replaced with a freezing one.Taiga doesn't respond.Hiiro waits.-post-ep38 taihii. taiga’s a depressed bastard. hiiro doesn't understand whats happening. its gay. thankz





	Pet Beetle

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this i think just after 38 came out so its probably not canon compliant we die like men  
> also im sorry this is mushy as hell but thats how it is on this earth

Hiiro visits Taiga's hospital a few days after he's discharged, to check on him.

Nico turns him away at the door.

"Yeah, it's uh, probably not the best idea?" She tries, attempting to bar the door with an arm. "He doesn't want to see y-" she stops mid-sentence and scrambles for better words, "He doesn't wanna see anyone."

Hiiro deepens his frown and pushes past the girl. Nico sighs, but the way her arm didn't put up any resistance when Hiiro pushed against it tells him more. Nico is worried about him too.

"Doctor Hanaya," Hiiro announces, formally, as he marches into the mans 'office'. 

"Who the fuck let you in? Nico? Nico?!"  
Taiga barely acknowledges Hiiro's presence, instead craning his neck around to see his assistant. She had trailed through the halls behind Hiiro and now stood in the doorway, shrugging as she popped her bubblegum. "Sorry, dude. He's determined."

"This is specifically what I didn't want to happen," Taiga says, standing now, and finally focusing his attention on Hiiro with a huff.

Every time, he thinks, Hiiro hates that he has to angle his head upwards to look the man in the eyes, but that thought evaporates as he notices the dark circles under the other man's stare are deepened. It lends a corpse-like feeling to his overall appearance, not helped by the hallowed look of his cheeks and dark irises, shaded from any reflecting light by his fringe to look even more lifeless. 

"Have you been... eating?" Hiiro starts, vaguely aware that Taiga is watching him scan his face, and then body, in a way that is less like a medical professional and more, even Hiiro will admit, like a worried friend. 

"I don't need you here to mother me," Taiga growls, but he motions to a grungy plate lying beside the even grungier keyboard of his PC. It's filled with popcorn crumbs and some half eaten apple slices, browned from air exposure and gathering an impressive number of flies.

"Yes, I've been taking the medications; yes, I've been sleeping; yes, yes, yes, whatever you want to hear." Taiga waves a hand. "You don't need to be here. Get out."

Hiiro hesitates at the tone of his voice on those last few words, which seem as threatening and unfriendly as ever. And here he thought they'd been making progress. 

"Listen," he starts, electing to ignore Taiga's low growl and eyeroll, "I just want to make sure that you, as my patient, aren't going to..." He trails off. Starts again. "The surgery was complicated, and if you're reckless, and something reopens, it could..." Hiiro purses his lips. That's not right either. "I'm... worried." He finally settles on, taking a deep breath in and looking up at Taiga.

Maybe it's a dumb reason, but maybe it's also best to be honest.   
Or something like that.

Taiga laughs. Cruelly, deep and scathing. Just like him. "You're worried!" he raises an eyebrow. "I don't need your worry, 'Doctor Kagami', or your sympathy, or your home visits. Leave."

Taiga points to the door. 

Hiiro breathes in. One last try. "It's just that-"  
He's cut off as the air is knocked out of him, spinning suddenly as he's pinned against the thin, dirty wall of Taiga's makeshift study. He hears Nico's sound of surprise, and Taiga's breath, hot against his ear. 

"Leave."

Hiiro grits his teeth and tries to push away from the wall, but he's held in place, overpowered by the taller of them.

Then the pressure on his back is released, and he stumbles slightly away from the wall, coughing and bringing a hand to his face. 

Taiga has stepped away, returning to his desk chair, facing away from Hiiro. His posture is no longer aggressive and forward, he instead seems shrunken into himself, shoulders slouched and head drooping. Wilted.

"Just get out." He says. His voice is much the same.

Hiiro gives up. He sighs, shrugs at Nico, and begins walking back down the damp hallway of the abandoned hospital, sparing only a single (slightly worried) glance back at the radiologist slumped in his chair. Still corpse-like.

Nico follows him to the exit, hovering in the door for a moment. She looks expectant, and even more worried than Hiiro, probably.

"I'm making sure he eats," she blurts out, and Hiiro nods. 

"Good. If anything... drastic, happens... Call me, okay?" He sighs again and begins walking back to his car, gravel crunching sadly under his shoes. 

"He's just upset," He stops and turns around again when Nico speaks up. "He's still mad at himself, I think. Like, survivor's guilt or whatever." Nico shrugs. "He's mad you sacrificed what's-her-face," 

"Saki." Hiiro corrects softly.

"Saki," Nico nods, "Yeah, your girlfriend. Sorry. But he's just upset and confused about that or whatever." 

"I made my choice." Hiiro says, raising his chin. "He can respect that." 

\-----

Hiiro doesn't hear from Nico for a week. He sends her a quick email to make sure that Taiga's stitches are holding up, purely out of his feelings of medical responsibility for a patient. 

She responds the next day with a text message.

sup dude. hes fine i think. hes a doctor too so he says he knows how to handle the stitches and stuff. hes been sleeping a lot but i think thats just like cos he still feels like crap or whatevr. and i give him fruit every day. hes like a pet beetle lol. thx for worrying.   
ps. no one emails anymore. ever. i forgot i had one. just text me. 

He ignores Nico's abysmal grammar and typing, as well as her choice of 'dude' as a means of addressing him, and crinkles his brow in concern at a particular line. 

"You can't just feed him fruit," he mumbles at his phone, "He needs proteins and-"

"Hiiro...?" he snaps his head up at the small voice.   
Emu stares at him from across the table of CR, eyes wide with concern. "Are you talking to yourself?" 

"No," Hiiro locks his phone and stands. "No. I'm going out though. I have an errand to run."

\-----

He stops at a 24hour convenience store and picks up three ready-made ham and cheese sandwiches on whole wheat, hoping to God that the run down hospital has at least a working fridge. 

As an afterthought, he grabs a bottle of some sports drink, figuring the electrolytes might help as well. 

Plastic bag in hand, he bangs on the door of Taiga's palace, but no-one -- Nico or the doctor -- comes to open it. Huffing, he tries the handle, slightly surprised to find it opens with a bit of shaking. Maybe it doesn't even lock. Maybe when you live in a giant abandoned building with questionable structural integrity, burglars aren't top of the list as far as safety concerns go. 

He lets himself in and manages to find his way to the cluster of rooms where Taiga... lives, he guesses. Most of them are dark, and no outside light is available to help. 

A small light comes from one doorway, adjacent to the one that houses Taiga's PC, if he remembers the layout correctly. He peeks his head in, knocking softly on the open door to announce his entrance.

The room is dimly lit, just a pair of desk lamps set on a table just inside the doorway, but it's enough to illuminate a dark figure laid on a pair of cots that have been pushed together into a makeshift double bed, railings pushed out of the way and backed into a corner to create some semblance of a normal living space. The decor is empty IV drip stands and an out of commission ECG, complementing the washed out and plasticky green-grey hospital curtains that frame the single grimy window. 

Martha Stewart could probably sell it. 

Hiiro sets down the bag of food beside the two lamps (he can find a fridge later), and moves to examine the body sprawled on the cots. His suspicions are confirmed as he gets close enough to see lighter patches in the person's hair and hears him grumble, "Nico...?" as he shifts his weight but doesn't move to get up.

Hiiro knits his brows further together, bringing the back of his hand to touch Taiga's forehead, and feeling the warmth of a light fever. 

"You need to drink more fluids," Hiiro grabs the sports drink from the bag and tosses it at Taiga, who barely reacts aside from a flinch and then a groan as it hits his arm.

"Fuck... what the hell are you doing here?" Taiga finally cracks open one eye, staring accusingly at the drink, which has tumbled onto the mattress in front of him. Hiiro seats himself on the empty half of the cots, closer to the wall. Taiga himself is spread across both, horizontally according to the cots proper use, Hiiro assumes to stop him from falling through the gap thats left between the two while he sleeps. There's no blanket, just a single pillow and a folded sheet, both of which are at the other end of the bed. 

"I brought you food," Hiiro says, grabbing the drink again and twisting the lid off. "Sit up, drink this."

"Don't need your food," Taiga grumbles, readjusting to face away from Hiiro. "Leave me alone."

"You need more than just fruit to recover, and you're running a fever." Hiiro points out, tapping the drink against his now turned back. "Honestly, Taiga, you know this. Stop being a baby. You need to take care of yourself or else--"

"It's your fault anyway," Taiga snaps, suddenly pushing himself up and grabbing the bottle away from Hiiro's hands. It sloshes onto the cot and onto Taiga's shirt, and he curses. "You didn't have to--" Before he can finish the thought, Taiga snaps his jaw shut, and stares angrily at the sports drink, willing it to spontaneously implode in his hands. He scoffs, and then drinks it all at once, wiping his mouth on one sleeve and tossing the bottle into a corner of the room. It clatters hollowly on the tile. 

Martha Stewart is rapidly losing her patience.

Taiga falls back onto the cots, and they creak and rattle dangerously under the weight. "You can go now."

Hiiro crosses his arms. Taiga's eyes are closed, and he takes a deep breath, chest rising shakily.  
Neither of them move. The room buzzes with the soft sound of electricity from the two lamps, and the several flies that hover in every room of the hospital, but other than that, it's silent. 

"I want to talk to you." Hiiro takes the deep dive off the grotto cliff, plunging into ice cold water that fills the room with it's chill as the warm, charged silence is replaced with a freezing one. 

Taiga doesn't respond.

Hiiro waits. 

The water doesn't warm. He jumps again. 

"Nico said to me that you're upset about Saki." He tries.

That gets a response. A small huff. Then more quiet.

"She said something about survivors guilt, and you need to know that the decision I made was--"

"I'm not upset," Taiga says, huffing again. "And it doesn't matter, and I am not going to sit here and talk about my feelings or whatever you want to do. Bye."

"Taiga." 

"....."

"Hanaya Taiga. You're depressed, and that means you're not recovering properly."

"I've been severely depressed for a solid five and a half years now," Taiga snaps back, "But thanks for the diagnosis."

"Listen," Hiiro says. He's beginning to get fed up with having to tiptoe around. "I helped you. I... I had to make a difficult choice, and I chose to help you, and I don't really want you to ruin it by refusing to reco--"

"You didn't have to." Taiga's voice is bitter and loaded. "It wasn't a fucking choice, Hiiro. There was only one answer and you didn't get it. You fucked up."

"I... Excuse me?" Hiiro is more confused than concerned now, and more than a little angry at that answer. 

"I told you to save Saki. I told you! That's the answer, Hiiro, I die, Saki lives. That's how it should have been back then, that's how it's supposed to be now, but you fucked it up." Taiga's voice isn't raised, it's still quiet and gravelly, rough from disuse. 

Hiiro is quiet for a stretch, thinking about the words. Thinking about Saki. Thinking about five years ago. He feels tears forming at the corners of his eyes.

"It's not your fault Saki--"

"Don't fucking lie to me, okay?" Taiga interrupts. "Blah, blah, 'I feel responsible too', blah. You saying that doesn't make it better. Doesn't excuse that I could have done better, and it doesn't excuse that you had the chance to bring her back and you fucked it up, and I don't know why!" 

Hiiro is shaking. He's not sure when it started. 

It wasn't a fucking choice, Hiiro.

Is that what he thought? If Taiga'd let him know beforehand, it would have saved him a lot of suffering, Hiiro thought bitterly.

But it was a choice. That he had made. That he had thought long and hard about, and this was his decision. 

"Saki's been dead for five years." Hiiro starts. He isn't willing himself to speak but the words come anyway. "I've lived without her, and everyone else has, for five years. Bringing her back would be... illogical." He can feel the tears on his cheeks, falling comically onto his fisted hands. 

Then he turns to Taiga. The other man's back is still facing him, huddled in a way that makes him look strangely vulnerable.

"Why do you care that much about Saki?" Hiiro asks, despite his now exposed emotions still genuinely curious, and remembering his goal of talking to Taiga about what upset him. "Is this just your personal fulfillment still? You think that if you die Saki will be avenged somehow?"

Taiga laughs. It's joyless. "If I thought that my death would avenge her, I would have tried long ago. Oh, wait." 

Hiiro's mind supplies unbidden images of the aftermath of Graphite's attack, through his own tear stained vision, frozen photographs of a younger Taiga, eyes nearly as empty as now. Blood on his clothes and matted in his hair. Hiiro's father and Poppy supporting his weight, leading him out of CR and away. Hiiro didn't follow, but he knows, somehow, they headed for the psychiatric recovery ward.

He grits his teeth. "Then, why?" Hiiro pulls himself fully from his repressed memories and refocuses on the Taiga in front of him. "Even if Saki came back, what would it mean to anyone if someone else had to die?" 

"It would mean a lot to her. And to you." Taiga stays facing away from Hiiro. 

He suddenly has a thought. Oh. "You... you loved her? You loved Saki?" Hiiro is filled with an indescribable emotion. 

Taiga had loved Saki enough to die for her? The feeling is warm, sort of, a gladness that his... friend? Former enemy? Would lay down his life for his girlfriend, but also, strange, because that was his girlfriend, and Hiiro can't decide if he should be angry or upset or--

"You're really such an idiot," Taiga is laughing again. Still devoid of any positive emotions. Still cold. He's rolled onto his back now, staring at the pockmarked panelling of the ceiling. "You're a fool, Hiiro, you don't know anything. You're a fucking idiot. You wouldn't know love if it punched your lights out." 

"What?" Hiiro has settled on an emotion, namely, immense confusion. 

"I didn't love Saki. I don't even know if you really loved Saki, the way you treated her. I didn't get it. I still don't get it at all. I'm an idiot too." Taiga's eyes are still glued to the panels. "She was a fine person, you know. I didn't hate her. I liked her I guess. She was sweet. She made you smile."

Hiiro doesn't know what to say. His relationship with Saki had been strained, to say the least. They hadn't been particularly lovey... but Hiiro remembers being in love. At least he thinks he does. His entire world feels shaken, never having heard this rendition, this interpretation of his and Saki's relationship. After her death, everyone had only been kind, told him how much he must miss her, how sad it was to lose someone you loved. 

"She made you happy." Taiga is still talking, Hiiro realizes. "She made you happy."

He's just murmuring that now, over and over. Hiiro finds himself no less confused. 

"She made me happy...? And that's why you'd die to bring her back?" Hiiro asks "I don't understand..."

"'Course you don't," Taiga barks. "You're an idiot! You can't understand what it's like to be in love with someone, and watch someone else make them happy, but you know what? It's okay, it's fine because at least they're happy. At least someone makes them happy, even if it isn't you, you still know they're smiling."

Hiiro opens his mouth to say something, but Taiga keeps speaking instead. 

"And you can't understand how it feels to watch that other person be stripped away, and how it feels to watch a person you love stop smiling, and you can't make them smile, and you can't bring back what makes them happy, and the best part--!" Taiga cackles, tossing his head back even more. Hiiro can see damp lines running down his face. "The best part is that you're the one who took away what made them happy! And now the person who you love, hates you. They hate you so much. So what do you do? What can you do?"

"And what if you're given a chance, a chance that means even if you have to die you can bring back that thing and make the person you love smile again. Wouldn't you? Huh, Hiiro? Would it even be a choice?" Taiga finally turns his head and makes eye contact with him, and Hiiro swears he feels his heart stop for a split second from the sudden weight of raw emotion carried in Taiga's gaze. 

"I--" Hiiro starts, not sure if he's going to try and answer the question or what, but Taiga's voice stops him again. It's small, and broken sounding, far too delicate for Hiiro to ever believe before this moment that it could come from his lips.

"I would die, one million times over," Taiga says, "If it had the slightest chance of bringing Saki back, so you could smile again."

Taiga's expression softens a bit, a near smile, bittersweet and pained. "Get it?"

Hiiro doesn't know how to make his mouth move, it's dry and heavy and he wishes that there was some of the sports drink left. He nods slightly. Helplessly.

Taiga breaks eye contact, turning his stare back at the ceiling. "So, see. You answered wrong. You brought back the wrong fucking person. You had that chance and you wasted it and now what?" 

Hiiro breathes deeply, trying to collect his thoughts. Attempting to process the flood of new information. Taiga was in love, with him. Not Saki. Taiga would die to save Saki, but not for her sake. For Hiiro's. 

They're quiet for a long period. Ten minutes. Fifteen, maybe twenty. Hiiro doesn't count. Doesn't bother to check his watch or even move. They just sit, stewing, considering. Hiiro tries to organize what's just happened but his brain seems to short circuit, as it so often does when it comes to social interaction. He gives up. He thinks about How he feels about Saki, or how he thought he felt. He thinks about how he feels about Taiga, and can't figure it out. He thinks about what to do, and comes up short on ideas. So much for his genius brain. 

It's Taiga who finally breaks the silence, whatever unknown amount of quiet thinking time later. His voice is notably less emotional now, which Hiiro thinks is good, but the words still hit him hard.

"So yeah, Hiiro, I'm fucking angry. I'm mad. I'm upset. I'm whatever fancy word you want to use because I don't know what to do with you. I don't know how to help you. And you don't even want my help because you hate me or whatever so I guess I'll just rot here and--"

"If you die, I'll kill you for real," Hiiro snaps, surprising himself with both the outburst and his idiotic choice of words. 

Taiga snorts. 

"Stop. I'm serious. You, you--" Hiiro suddenly feels like punching Taiga. That's not really new, but its a different motivation behind the punch. A punch of caring, maybe. A 'don't be stupid' punch.

"If you die it won't make me happy. It'll make me more angry than you are now."

"Hard to believe," Taiga smirks dryly, and Hiiro is somehow glad that his snarkiness is showing through even at such an honestly depressing moment. "Since I'm pretty fucking angry."

"I'd be twice as angry," Hiiro replies immediately, "Because maybe I did fuck it up, and maybe I answered wrong but you dying wouldn't make anything better. You have to own it now."

"Own it...?" Taiga's eyebrows are raised.

"You have to-" Hiiro stops short, suddenly blisteringly aware of what he had been about to say. He pauses, and Taiga's eyebrows lower, and his frown deepens. 

"Have to what." He demands.

"You have to... be the one who makes me smile..." Hiiro lets his voice trail off. He can feel his face heating, even still soaked with tears and red from crying it's probably obvious. He rolls his shoulders uncomfortably, shuffling a bit where he sits. 

"The fuck does that mean," Taiga says, voice accusatory and suspicious. 

Hiiro wonders if you can get neck pain from emotional whiplash. 

"I don't-- I don't know, it just seemed like--" He stammers. It had seemed like the right thing to say. He wasn't sure what it meant.

"Don't fuck with me, Hiiro." Taiga sounds leagues different from the vulnerable words of his... confession? He's waving a finger in Hiiro's face.

"F-- What?" 

"Up until a month or two ago you hated my guts, you would have killed me in an instant, and now we're cool and I'm telling you I've been in love with you for six years and you're saying it's okay?" Taiga asks. His voice is calmly furious, and Hiiro is confused all over again. 

"I don't really know whats happening," Hiiro admits, holding up his hands helplessly. "I-- I don't hate you. Not anymore. I hated you a lot but --" he breaks off. He hates his stammering. His childish words. How can he be so eloquent, so well spoken at his job, recite the names of every surgical instrument the hospital has, but when he tries to talk to people his vocabulary takes a vacation and he's left as a mess of awkward sentence fragments.

Taiga is still staring at him intensely. 

Hiiro stares back. He feels utterly vulnerable.   
He's 18 again and just met Saki for the first time. He's 13 and just got his first confession from a girl in middle school. 

Neither of those are just like this moment, but they carry a similar weight, an indescribable sameness that flutters and taps against the inside of his ribcage in time with his heartbeat. 

"I think I want to kiss you," He says, dumbly.   
Taiga obliges, barely breathing as he leans forward, shifting his weight to bring himself closer to Hiiro. The misused hospital cots creak slightly, and Taiga presses his dry lips to Hiiro's, soft and recently chapsticked. 

"I... Uhhh... Uh.." Hiiro says, after Taiga pulls away, dark eyes still locked on his own, still corpse-like in a terrifying way, but shining in the dim lamp light with some abstract kind of hope.

"Is that okay...?" Taiga asks, face turning concerned when Hiiro fails to vocalize anything more than dumb noises. 

"Yes. Yeah. Yes. It's," He tries. "This is weird," he finally says, once again opting for honesty as all else escapes him. 

"Yeah, it's fucking weird." Taiga agrees. He sits back. 

"Wait, I mean--" Hiiro reaches out and grabs onto one of Taiga's sleeves, before a glare at the offending hand makes him drop it. "I mean, I didn't... not like it...?"

"You have a way with words." Taiga scratches the back of his head. "I think it's-- Like, we should.. not do this. Not right now." 

Hiiro feels a strange pang of dislike at that statement, and his head spins with even more confusion at what that means, but he nods. 

"Just like... we should chill out and think more. And talk more or... something." Taiga says. The eye contact is gone, and he sits almost sheepishly, trying to look everywhere but at Hiiro.

"We can talk about it tomorrow," Hiiro suggests, realizing once again his heart-- or, whatever else, --seems to have overridden his brain in thinking as he continues, "We can promise, promise to talk about everything tomorrow no matter how weird it is, and right now we can--" 

"You'd really promise that?" Taiga laughs, and this time, it's lighter. "Kagami Hiiro, promising me a talk about his feelings? Where am I?" 

Hiiro feels his face burn even warmer. "Taiga." 

"Hiiro."

"I... want to kiss you again."

Taiga obliges.

\-----

Hiiro never does remember to find a fridge for the sandwiches.


End file.
